The perceived clutter of an image is a perceptual characteristic of images that represents a significant aspect of image quality in the consumer image domain. Generally, images having a higher level of perceived clutter will have a correspondingly lower level of image quality. Therefore, the ability to estimate the perceived clutter of an image is important component of being able to determine the perceived image quality.
While most people have an intuitive feel for how to visually evaluate the degree of clutter in an image, determining quantitative measures for image clutter has been a great challenge in computer vision. Previous studies have generally used low level information in an image to predict image clutter. For example, Rosenholtz et al., in an article entitled “Measuring visual clutter” (Journal of Vision, Vol. 7, pp. 1-22, 2007), have described a method for predicting image clutter which uses color, orientation, and luminance contrast as predictive features. Such approaches have had only limited success, especially in the consumer image domain.
There remains a need for a robust method for estimating the perceived clutter of consumer images.